Most people take mirrors for granted (if they’re vain) but you must realize that the modern glass mirror was only invented in 1600 by Venetians (of course). However, it took another three hundred years before mirrors were actually affordable enough for all households, and these were often quite small. And now? Mirrors, mirrors everywhere.
It has been said that to break a mirror will bring seven years of bad luck. And I’m sure “they” said it, because we’ve all heard of this hazard. But it’s actually much worse than seven years of bad luck. No. Anyone who breaks a mirror will die a horrible, horrible death. No shit.
Have you ever seen something in a mirror—some color or movement—that you know wasn’t on this (the real) side of things? If not, good. You’re not insane.
If only Narcissus had a mirror! He could have looked at himself all he wanted without the threat of nymphs.
Mirrors are said to ward off evil, since evil can’ t stand to look at itself. So people put mirrors facing the front door. It’s perfectly logical and actually works. However, evil often enters through a window.
Inside each mirror is another universe much like our own except everything is spelled backwards.
There are still many primitive people of the world who have never seen a mirror, and the best thing they can come to is a still pool of water, or a dark bowl of water—and even then, they’re always leaning down. Miles Peterson, the renowned anthropologist, was visiting a remote tribe deep in the Amazon when his mirror became anathema. Peterson had taken out a hand-sized signal mirror to shave and the village priest—inquisitive—leaned over Peterson’s shoulder. The priest saw his own face in the reflection and somehow thought Peterson had stolen his head. The villagers killed Peterson, smashed his mirror to bits and later all died horrible, horrible deaths.
A mirror reflects light at an angle particular to its surface, and the reflected light preserves most of the characteristics of the original light. That is to say, that what you see in the mirror is just refracted light, but nothing that is truly real. You see the image of reality, spun 180-degrees on a vertical axis. To see things in the truest light, one would need to look into a mirror facing another mirror and view the second reflection.
Some early mirrors used mercury or lead applied to a bit of glass, and the manufacture of such mirrors resulted in high mortality rates. Mirror-maker was once the most dangerous occupation in the world.
Mirrors have also been used as weapons. Ancient warriors of Mongolia wore mirrored armor to protect them from evil and to ward off the enemy by dazzling their eyes with light. The Persians stole this technology and improved upon it so well that some of their warriors could not even be seen unless they moved—otherwise they would appear as a shimmering reflection of their surroundings.
On that note, we all know that a concave mirror can concentrate the sun’s energy so well that a hand-sized version can ignite paper. But consider what the international space station’s true goal is—and that is to install a concave mirror a mile in diameter, positioned in low orbit. The mirror could be turned or configured to generate weather patterns, illuminate a city at night, or focused into a ray of death approximately 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit—capable of turning any object we can imagine into ash in a nanosecond.
Funhouse mirrors are not fun, and they’re barely mirrors. Polished metal can never refract light with the same precision as plate glass backed with silver. To look into a distorted reflection can bring about madness and other psychological afflictions.
Many early mirrors were made of polished stone or great pieces of mica. No wonder people back then didn’t look as good as we look today.
Three mirrors! Now we’re getting somewhere. If you ever have the opportunity to have three mirrors before you, play with their placement to give yourself multiple torsos, or to see your reflection in reflection in reflection in reflection all the way to infinity. If you brought a telescope and looked into the furthest reflection, it would be a much younger version of yourself since light can only travel so fast. No matter how fast you look, you’ll never see the “now” of reality, but only the past. DeSelby, the famous philosopher, drove himself to madness with three mirrors on this very concept.
Another less-famous madman and philosopher was Ambrose Delasco, who taught for a time at the City College of New York. Delasco became infatuated with DeSelby’s work with three mirrors, so took it to the next level. Delasco found that each successive reflection in a mirror not only occurred in the past, but images would get successively older each time refracted. To this end, he created a device that started out with a two small mirrors in front of the eyes that reflected what was reflected from a slightly larger mirror, which in turn reflected what was reflected by a slightly larger mirror until a total of forty-seven reflections would enter the eye at the smallest mirrors nearest the wearer. His contraption was limited by size and weight, as Delasco intended to walk the earth “seeing in the present what had already occurred in the past.” You can imagine the looks he got when tromping around Harlem with his two-hundred pound refraction device strapped to his body, the great arcs of mirrors looping on metal hoops some ten feet into the air. On his second outing, Delasco was struck by a city bus while wearing the mirrors because he didn’t see it coming, which not only put him in the hospital, but made him abandon his experiments with mirrors since “the past and the present cannot coexist.”
If you look sideways in a mirror, how come you can still see things in periphery that aren’t facing the mirror? Please do not try this at home, since it can cause dislocation and madness.
A stupid little shit named Tommy Phelps, of Alton, Illinois, didn’t believe in the bad luck associated with breaking mirrors. When, at the feisty age of fifteen, he said that breaking a mirror is just like breaking anything else, everyone stepped back a few paces. He was said to have broken over a thousand mirrors by the time he was in college. He argued, and this is where things get strange, that to break a mirror is actually to create more mirrors since each shard is capable of reflection. He went into physics and was widely published in the 1940s. His groundbreaking study on the positive aspects of smashing mirrors titled, “To Increase and Multiply,” shook the foundations of what we know of luck and evil. The highlight of the study was when he took large dressing mirror and broke it into thousands and thousands of mirror fragments, some the size of a pinhead. So much for all that bullshit about bad luck, right? Wrong. Thomas Phelps died by strangulation, amputation and drowning after he was shot, stabbed, poisoned and buried alive in burning oil—all at the same time. A pretty fucking horrible death, if you ask me.
Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen a different face looking back at you in surprise? That would be pretty weird.
Many people remember their first kiss with another human, but forget all the practice they had kissing themselves in the mirror to see what it will look like to another. In his own experiments, the author didn’t French kiss until the age of twenty-seven due to the trauma experienced when French kissing himself in the mirror and the ensuing horror. The horror.
One-way mirrors are also called two-way mirrors. There is no explanation for this, but it is well known that to look from behind a mirror (into what the mirror is reflecting) is to see another reality entirely. This is why one-way (or two-way) mirrors are used so often for dubious purposes. Any public mirror is likely a one-way (or two-way) mirror. What you’re looking at is a reflection, certainly, but the reflection is also being looked at from behind by a camera or government agent. The only way to know is to smash the mirror, but then you die a horrible, horrible death. Much better to just realize that you’re always being watched and act accordingly.
It has been predicted that the next, and perhaps last, great invention of mankind will be a mirror capable of accurate reflection… that is, a reflection that is occurring simultaneously as that which it reflects, and doesn’t spin everything reverse on the vertical axis. However, this technology is beyond our comprehension at the present. For now, one can only hope.
aleakypen (Stuff for your head to use quietly.) 